The availability of various content items on the Internet allows access to information in bulk. However, the sheer volume of content items available does not increase the usefulness of the content items. The information presented in the content items themselves should be relevant to each user. For example, a user interested in learning about current political developments may request content items. Content items with information on living and style may be irrelevant to the user, even though the same content item may be enjoyable for another user.
Other than matching relevant content items to users' requests, the volume of content items has also made it difficult to select and provide content items in a timely manner. For example, if a content item is not provided within certain time criteria, then a user may have a poor Website experience (e.g., slowly loading Web pages, incorrectly rendered Web pages) or other undesirable effects. Users may grow frustrated and choose to never view content items from that Website again, even if the content items are particularly relevant.
From the perspective of a request processing system, it is difficult to provide both timely and relevant content items to users. There are often many requests for content items from not only one user, but many users at a given time. The volume of requests or queries per second (QPS) may create a poor experience for users. For example, there may be one or more different services used by the request processing system to select relevant content items. Some of these services may have lower throughput or be able to handle a lower load than other services used by the request processing system, before reaching its maximum throughput. This may result in a bottleneck situation, slowing down the entire request processing system.
Therefore, it is desirable to have improved methods to match users with content items within specified time constraints.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.